With the online viewings of his negative ads about Barack Obama skyrocketing, and the media abuzz about them 24/7, there’s clearly no reason for John McCain to change course now. This morning his campaign released yet another 30-second TV spot that drubs Obama for being different from you, me and John McCain ("Life in the spotlight must be grand, but for the rest of us, times are tough").

Where Obama is concerned, these attacks always have some impact at the level of race, but mainly this is a class attack of the same sort that the Republican party has successfully used for over 20 years now. As David Schultz noted the other day here, it’s the subject of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas?, which is still the best big-picture analysis of GOP dominance anyone has written.

But they have never done it so ruthlessly or so well as when Karl Rove and his team were calling the shots, as they now do at McCain HQ. What makes Rove’s electioneering so devastating at the retail level is the elemental simplicity of his attack strategy in both conception and execution. No one is better at talking down to people with one arm wrapped collegially around their shoulders.

The Democrats, party apparatchiks and rank-and-file alike, are getting awfully worried, as WashPost writes this morning. Chuck Schumer has gone public with his plea that Obama must hit harder in response. John Aravosis of Americablog notes that McCain’s ads are not endearing him to the mainstream pundit class, but if you think that’s going to somehow make these ads a net negative for McCain’s campaign, then you’re just the sort of sucker Rove & Co. hope you are.

John McCain: "Painful" (:30)